Theoni Aldredge dies at 78; costume designer

Theoni V. Aldredge, a preeminent costume designer in theater and film who created wardrobes for more than 300 productions over nearly 50 years, died Friday at a Connecticut hospice, said her husband, actor Tom Aldredge. She was 78.

Know for her versatility as a costumer, Aldredge received an Oscar for her work on the 1974 film "The Great Gatsby." She also won three Tony Awards for designs for the Broadway plays "Annie," "Barnum" and "La Cage aux Folles" in the 1970s and 1980s.

A line of clothing based on the "Gatsby" designs was sold at Bloomingdales.

Aldredge also designed high-fashion costumes for the 1978 thriller "The Eyes of Laura Mars," in which Faye Dunaway plays a fashion photographer wearing a plaid cape and fedora. "Laura Mars" has become such a cult fashion film that designer Marios Schwab cited it as an influence for his fall 2010 collection for Halston.

On Broadway more than a thousand Aldredge designs appeared simultaneously in 1984 in five musicals: "A Chorus Line," "Dreamgirls," "La Cage aux Folles," "The Rink" and "42nd Street."

Papp once observed that Aldredge did not create costumes so much as "real clothing that develops out of character."

In Hollywood she oversaw the costumes for nearly 40 feature films, including "Network" (1976), "Ghostbusters" (1984), "Moonstruck" (1987), "Addams Family Values" (1993) and "The First Wives Club" (1996).

When "Addams Family Values" came out, Aldredge said in The Times of her costumes: "I envisioned a family who digs into old trunks and graves for their clothes. … Everything should look just a little dusty. We'd throw some buff powder on the edges of a lapel … and rub it in."

Her work also encompassed ballet, opera, television and Las Vegas stage shows. She might create an Elizabethan period costume for one and contemporary street fashion for another.

Period costuming was easier "because no one knows enough to complain," Aldredge told the Toronto Star in 1995. "A hoop skirt is a hoop skirt."

She was born Theoni Athanasiou on Aug. 22, 1932, in northeastern Greece. Her mother died when Theoni was very young. She was raised, along with three brothers, by her father, Athanasios V. Vachliotis, a surgeon general of Greece who was active in politics.

As a child, she learned to sew and decided to become a costume designer after viewing the 1946 film "Caesar and Cleopatra," according to biographical sources.